New in version 2013-01

enable KMS support for ATi, Intel, drm-cirrus, Matrox and nVidia based graphics chipsets.

DRI (3d) support for ATi Radeon chipsets (refer to non-free sources and Drivers).

KDE 4.8.4 (en + de).

Iceweasel 10.0.12ESR

new, SVG based, art theme created by the aptosid art team.

offline manual for en + de directly on the disc, online manuals for more languages online at http://manual.aptosid.com/ and available via apt; a big thank you goes to the documentation and translation teams!

Please note that the offline manual is only available on the running live CD or the installed system.

access point support for many mac80211 based wlan cards through nl80211 and hostapd (optional).

client support for network booting over PXE/ NBD.

support QXL graphics emulation (SPICE).

add loopback.cfg generation, to provide generic live media support for grub2.

provide a safety fallback for generic efi binary and bootloader detection to the live media.

New in version 2012-01 (December 3rd, 2012)

Debian sid, as of 2012-12-01.

kernel 3.6.9-rc1 (smp, hard preemption).

xserver-xorg-core 1.12.4.

enable KMS support for ATi, Intel, drm-cirrus, Matrox and nVidia based graphics chipsets.

DRI (3d) support for ATi Radeon chipsets (refer to non-free sources and Drivers).

KDE 4.8.4 (en + de).

Iceweasel 10.0.11ESR

new, SVG based, art theme created by the aptosid art team.

offline manual for en + de directly on the disc, online manuals for more languages online at http://aptosid.com/manual/ and available via apt; a big thank you goes to the documentation and translation teams!

Please note that the offline manual is only available on the running live CD or the installed system.

access point support for many mac80211 based wlan cards through nl80211 and hostapd (optional).

client support for network booting over PXE/ NBD.

ASPM refinements to improve system stability and battery runtime for mobile devices.

support for the 3rd generation Bamboo Pen and Touch tablets.

switch from module-init-tools to kmod.

support for ACPI 5.0.

Open vSwitch support for virtual network switching.

"buffer bloat" improvements.

BCM57766 support for tg3.

basic FireWire target disk mode support has been ported to linux' sbp-2.

New in version 2011-03 (January 1st, 2012)

New features in aptosid 2011-03 "Πόνος" are in particular kernel 3.1 and numerous integration and stabilisation fixes. Special focus has been cast upon improving the system compatibility with new hardware platforms and various corner cases. Kernel 3.1 doesn't only improve and stabilise hardware support for newer devices, it also improves latency and general system performance, particularly vastly improved I/O scheduling for lvm2/ mdadm on SSDs.

Among the new features are inital XEN dom0 and PCI passthrough support as well as nested virtualization for kvm on intel and amd CPUs. The graphics arena provides improved support for Intel sandy bridge graphics (HD2000/ HD3000) and for AMD llano graphics, just like nouveau starting to provide basic support for the GeForce 4xx/ 5xx series and bringing 3d capabilities to selected chipsets. Subsystem support for DVB-T2 devices and the first devices is now available.

The networking subsystem now offers wake on wlan support (WoWLAN) and support for various new RealTek and Broadcom devices.

GPT and UEFI reliability have been improved, which allows harddisks exceeding 2 TiB and their use for booting on new systems using UEFI instead of the traditional PC-BIOS.

As usual, a large number of individual functionality enhancements and bugfixes have been applied to the full package line up and aptosid's own packages, in order to improve the general distribution infrastructure. The past months have allowed us to take special care of the small aspects in many packages, to improve general policy compliance and functionality.

We'd like to thank our sponsor Webtropia (part of myLoc managed IT AG), who provides 3 dedicated servers for our development– and hosting infrastructure and are looking forward to a lasting and successful co-operation with this fine hosting business. With the new servers from myLoc managed IT AG we are finally able to have proper technical solutions for our needs, e.g. fully separated hardware for fast kernel- and ISO-building, and an extra server for running all our other sites in virtual machines (lab.aptosid.com, manual.aptosid.com, etc.). All our servers are running our own server version of aptosid.

New in version 2010-02 (September 14th, 2010)

Debian sid, as of 2010-09-13.

kernel 2.6.35.4 (smp, hard preemption).

X.org 7.5 (xserver-xorg-core 1.7.7).

enable KMS support for ATi and Intel based graphics chipsets.

DRI (3d) support for ATi Radeon chipsets up to r7xx (refer to non-free sources and Drivers).

KDE 4.4.5 (en + de).

Iceweasel 3.5.12

new, SVG based, art theme created by the aptosid art team.

offline manual for en + de directly on the disc, online manuals for more languages online at http://manual.aptosid.com/ and available via apt; a big thank you goes to the documentation and translation teams!

Please note that the offline manual is only available on the running live CD or the installed system.

access point support for many mac80211 based wlan cards through nl80211 and hostapd (optional).

client support for network booting over PXE/ NBD.

fix the CFQ I/O scheduler regression.

fixed "liveapt" functionality.

many small fixes throughout the package lists.

New in version 2009-04 (January 4th, 2010)

For "Μόρος", development concentrated on updating the bootloader infrastructure for live- and installed system, but also took upstream changes like kernel 2.6.32 and KDE 4.3.4 and further KDE4 applications into account. On the installed system, grub2 now replaces the traditional grub-gfxboot bootloader, while the live system now employs isolinux and an improved gfxboot theme.

While grub2 offers increased flexibility for installations, like supporting new filesystems (ext4) or advanced installation options like LVM2 and improved detection capabilities for other distributions and operating systems, right now it is limited to a textmode menu. A new theming effort is currently under development and will be available in the future. Even though support for plain wallpapers would be already supported by grub2, it is still fragile and prolongs the system boot. Internally the configuration system for grub2 uses scripts snippets under /etc/grub.d/ to create its configuration file "grub.cfg" in a way that allows many self updating features, such as automating fromiso support with the help of "grub2-fll-fromiso" (optional).

With isolinux now supporting gfxboot, it is now also possible to use isohybrid, which allows writing an ISO directly to USB storage or sd/ sdhc/ mmc memory sticks to make these bootable. isohybrid adds an MBR to the ISO and sets up a partition table with one active entry, the partition containing the ISO. Further partitions can be added to allow access to the unused part of the storage device. As part of overhauling the gfxboot theme, the language menu has been moved to the F2 key and extended with a keyboard sub-menu, which allows further specifying the desired keymap. If the desired layout is not available from the menu, xkbmodel, keytable, xkbvariant and xkboptions can now be set as cheatcodes on the kernel command line. A new timezone menu has been added under F3, while F4 allows selecting the source of the compressed root filesystem (CD, harddisk, NBD), while advanced kernel options are available under F5; F6 allows adding including firmware images from live medium or removable storage.

Network booting from network block devices (NBD) is now supported, as well as fromiso/ fromhd systems on LVM2 volumes, further information about NBD support is available under FAQ.

Kernel 2.6.32 doesn't only improve and stabilise hardware support for newer devices, it also allows enabling KMS (kernel based modesetting) for Intel graphic chipset and supports DRI and basic 3d support for ATi Radeon graphics cards up to the HD4xxx series (r6xx/ r7xx, hints for installing the required firmware are available at non-free sources and drivers). Likewise virtualisation support through KVM has been improved and now also supports KSM (Kernel Samepage Merging) to reduce the memory footprint of concurrent virtual machine. Upstream kernel development has also focussed on improved powersaving capabilities and optimised driver support for webcams and wlan cards.

As usual, a large number of individual functionality enhancements and bugfixes have been applied to the full package line up and sidux' own packages, in order to improve the general distribution infrastructure.

Our special thanks go to the sidux art team and especially all mirror hosters for their efforts regarding sidux. In particularly our thanks go to the Hetzner Online AG for upgrading the server hardware of sidux.com. Following this we would like to welcome the mirror hosted by Cybermirror in Düsseldorf, Germany.

New in version 2009-03 (November 11th, 2009)

Debian sid, as of 2009-11-11.

kernel 2.6.31.6 (smp, hard preemption).

X.org 7.4 (xserver-xorg-core 1.6.5).

KDE 4.3.2 (en + de).

Iceweasel 3.5.4

new, SVG based, art theme created by the sidux art team.

offline manual for en + de directly on the disc, online manuals for more languages online at http://manual.sidux.com/ and available via apt; a big thank you goes to the documentation and translation teams!

Please note that the offline manual is only available on the running live CD or the installed system.

access point support for many mac80211 based wlan cards through nl80211 and hostapd (optional).

current crda/ wireless-regdb.

fixed included locale packages.

new release artwork.

completely new X.org detection.

new partition and filesystem detection code.

overhauled fw-detect to probe for hardware with non-free needs.

USB 3.0 support.

fan control for Acer Aspire One netbooks (acerhdf).

Sound-Blaster-X-Fi support (snd-ctxfi).

New in version 2009-03 Preview 1 (October 25th, 2009)

A little later than originally planned, we now have the pleasure to announce the immediate availability of the first preview for sidux 2009-03 "Μώμος", shipping with kernel 2.6.31 and KDE 4.3.2 in the following flavours:

KDE-lite, amd64, en/ de, ≈565 MB.

KDE-lite, i686, en/ de, ≈560 MB.

XFCE-lite, amd64+i686, ≈765 MB.

Please note this is not the final release, the full featured final release of "Μώμος" will be ready in about 1-2 weeks, further previews might be provided as needed until then.

New in version 2009-02 (July 15th, 2009)

"Αιθήρ" mostly concentrates on integrating KDE4 into sidux and implementing the changes caused by kernel 2.6.30. While KDE4 is certainly a work in progress, both upstream and in terms of making it viable for a release, this marks the first milestone release for sidux. Be aware that the KDE-lite flavours avoid KDE3/ qt3 packages, which means that k3b, kaffeine and umtsmon are not preinstalled. These packages will be part of the KDE-full flavours and are still installable.

Kernel 2.6.30 not only improves and stabilises hardware support for newer devices, it also further adapts the scheduler support to improve prioritisation of disk accesses to speed them up. The kernel and module initialisation process has also seen further performance improvements..

Another hot topic has been ext3 performance and ext4 stability. While ext4 still has to be considered a new filesystem, which should still mature a bit before it can be relied upon in production systems, it is progressing quickly. For these reasons, we recommend against using ext4 for the time being.

Starting with kernel 2.6.30, new wlan drivers for Atheros ar9170usb, Atmel at76c50x-usb and Intel iwl1000, iwl6000 and iwl6050 devices have entered the stage and access point mode (nl80211) finally becomes available for many mac80211 based wlan chipsets (in combination with hostapd).

Further areas of improvements are webcam and DVB support as well as finally bringing 2d acceleration for ATi radeon chipsets up to r780 (textured Xv).

New in version 2009-01 (February 15th, 2009)

A little earlier than originally planned, we now have the pleasure to announce the availability of sidux 2009-01, shipping with kernel 2.6.28.6-rc1. It concentrates on integrating the changes caused by kernel 2.6.28, stabilising the init optimisations accomplished by insserv, and in particular improving the reliability of the installer and the USB installers. Kernel 2.6.28 doesn't only improve and stabilise hardware support for newer devices, it also adapts the I/O scheduler support for SSDs in order to improve prioritisation of disk access and to speed these up. Another major accomplishment is the deployment of the opensource OpenFWWF firmware for Broadcom wireless devices.